After his run of a lifetime, the 19.32 200m at Atlanta 1996 in which he cut .34 seconds off his own world record, I followed him around as best I could. I would attend every race of his that didn't require a plane flight. I also made sure to get a ticket behind the deep corner of the track, so I could watch the world's greatest runner put the pedal down coming out of that curve. Indeed, his legs pistoned and pounded so quickly as to appear as a blurry, shiny smear -- like a human bicycle wheel cycling at full speed.

I've never personally witnessed anything with my own eyes as exhilarating and inspiring as that.

Thousands of runners have tried to reach 19.32 for the last 12 years, some attempting to match Johnson's explosiveness and some simply trying to achieve the mark with pure talent and effort. But it took a man like Usain Bolt to solve the 200m problem again, in an entirely new and different way. It doesn't matter whether he's running around a corner or cutting a straight-lined figure, or if he's racing into a one-meter headwind. His raw and unrefined form that never seems overthought, his long strides and high center of gravity give Bolt strategic advantages that are exciting, never seen before, and ridiculous to the point of stadium-wide laughter.

A lot's been made of Bolt's entertainment value, his mugging for the cameras, the tai chi and archery shapes he throws before and after each race. Commentators, analysts, and even the head of the IOC are telling him to "keep it down" and more closely assume the serious attitude that Johnson had in his prime. But there's a difference between his ultimate confidence and the desperate trash talk of Johnson's immediate successors.

Bolt knows he has the answer to a difficult problem, a key that nobody else has discovered.

***

No matter what Jacques Rogge says on Sunday night, these are not the Greatest Games Ever, Dream Games, or even Spectacular Games. The International Olympic Committee awards a nation and city the right to carve out a place for a temporary Olympia every four years, and no government has accomplished this as destructively and as cruelly as China. Thousands have been displaced to create these stadiums, and countless numbers of citizens have been detained and killed in the name of Olympic security.

But this is just another chapter -- the twenty-ninth -- in the history of the modern Games, and it's certainly not the first time the Olympics have fallen short of its goal to better the world through sport. But the local and national governments have tackled the problem of hosting this festival in an unprecedentedly negative and destructive way, nearly always at odds with the high human ideals of the original founders. Beijing 2008 will always be remembered as a show of brutal strength.

To me, Usain Bolt is the true center and defining face of these Olympics. Not Michael Phelps, who had promised to show us something we've never seen before. The thing is that we have seen this before -- the white American hero who conquers the world and takes home all the prizes.

This time, though, it comes during an era when the U.S. has a tragic misunderstanding of the East, a damaged global reputation due to its own government's bloody conquests, as well as an economy dangerously dependent on foreign credit. Phelps' eight gold medals are little else than a distraction, pleasant nostalgia of easier times for those who don't want to accept 21st Century reality. Underneath all the forced politeness, the Olympic host country is America's mortal enemy -- and a formidable loan shark in the making.

Amidst all this, a happy young man from an island nation who rewrote the books of records and rules, here in the miniature and insignificant world of athletic achievement. Sure, this is a lot to be made of people running around a rubber track, but maybe Usain Bolt can represent a symbolic ray of hope.

Maybe on a larger scale, there are still some new solutions to be found for old problems.

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